With $10 million under their belt, creators of popular Crossy Road game take on Pac-Man

After three months on the market, Crossy Road had been downloaded 50 million times and earned revenue of more than $10 million. Now, after less than a year, the addictive game about a chook (and others) braving improbably dangerous crossings has been downloaded an astonishing 100 million times.

The worldwide hit has generated enough money for Victorian creators Andy Sum and Matt Hall — the founders and sole members of game studio Hipster Whale — to retire. But even so, they've continued to follow the familiar mobile game model — championed by leaders like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans — of working constantly on new updates and additions to the game to keep fans coming back to that big, blocky capsule machine of adventurous creatures.

The publisher had evidently been inspired by the duo's game (which was after all an attempt to blend another classic game — Frogger — with the virality of Flappy Bird and a smart, fair approach to asking players for money), and wanted to see what they could do with the iconic yellow ghost-muncher.

The result is Pac-Man 256, a game that's been live on iOS and Android for about a week and shot almost immediately to the top of the iOS charts in 47 countries (and number 2 in Australia) upon its release. It has, according to Hall, been downloaded 3 million times so far.

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Still indie, with help from their friends

As relative unknowns working on Crossy Road, Hipster Whale worked largely alone with the help of friends (like Australian freelance artist Ben Weatherall). Hall says that now, following their success, not much has changed.

For Pac-Man 256, along with some freelancers to pitch in with art and sound, Hipster Whale teamed up with another two-man developer from Melbourne called 3 Sprockets (Cubemen), meaning the game was made with a (still small) core team of four.

Getting glitchy

Hall says the duo was initially nervous that Pac-Man 256 was so different to Crossy Road, but they're "really, really happy" with the way has been received.

Pac-Man stars in the latest free update to Crossy Road, turning all the obstacles into ghosts.

As a vibrant game made up of addictive and potentially endless runs and controlled with simple swipes, it isn't hard to imagine Pac-Man 256 finding a broad audience, but it's clear the priority was pleasing fans of the original.

"It's definitely a harder game [than Crossy Road], and it's also a deeper game", Hall says. "It's really designed with the retro gamer in mind".

The infamous 256 glitch is the main hazard in the game, aside from the ghost gang.

The "256" in the title itself is something only arcade fans will immediately get, a reference to the famous glitch that obscured half the screen with nonsense code in the original Pac-Man if a player reached level 256, making it impossible to progress.

In the new game, this code rises up from the bottom of the screen, chasing Pac-Man as he runs an endless maze, collects fruit and dodges ghosts. As always, he can munch a power pellet to turn the tables and send the ghosts packing.

Hall believes that, apart from the endless design and glitch, the team has managed to maintain the look and feel of the original game, avoiding the common pitfall of "adding techno".

Feeding in the coins

As a free-to-play game, Crossy Road makes its money from selling new blocky characters to play as, or by giving players in-game credits for watching ads. The game avoids a lot of the sleazy "pay-to-win" or hard sell tactics of some free games, and while that's also true of Pac-Man 256, the payment system in the new game is quite different.

"We were trying to find out if we could have 100 characters like in Crossy Road, because we knew that worked", says Hall, "But what are we going to have? 100 colours of Pac-Man? The Crossy Road chicken coming across?"

In the end the team decided the character-unlock route was a distraction from their goal of a game that payed homage to Pac-Man, and so they "took a risk" on a different plan.

Collecting coins on the maze lets you purchase various power-ups, and for $5.95 in real money you can permanently double the worth of the coins, allowing you to progress faster.

Meanwhile, the player also has a maximum of six "credits" that refill automatically over time and must be spent each time you start Pac-Man off on his journey.

When you're out of credits you can keep playing for free, although you won't get to use any of your earned power-ups. You can wait for the refill, or alternatively you can pay $1.18 for a temporary boost of 12 credits or $9.58 for unlimited credits, effectively purchasing the game outright.

While only a minority of players will likely buy either of the permanent upgrades, Hall says the ability to unlock the game was aimed at the kind of old-school gamer who remembers Pac-Man from back in the day, "people who have played games their entire lives and have been a bit hostile to the change [toward micro-transactions]".